Saul Alinsky advised his fellow radicals to “deride [the] enemy and dismiss him as someone unworthy of being taken seriously because he is either intellectually deficient or morally bankrupt.” This tactic often manifests in blanket assertions reliant more on volume and repetition than evidence.

Though I doubt singer Sheryl Crow reads Alinsky, she certainly wields his tactic. In an interview with CBS journalist Katie Couric, Crow dismissed the Tea Party as a collection of uneducated rubes. Upon cursory examination, the accusation backfires.

“My main concern is that [the Tea Party is] really fear-based,” said Crow, a cancer survivor and environmental activist. “What’s coming out of the Tea Party most often, especially if you go onto YouTube, and you see some of the interviews with these people who really don’t even know what the issues are, they’re just swept up in the fear of it and the anger of it.”

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The singer also worried that the “uneducated” and “angry” Tea Partiers could even become dangerous. “[K]nowledge is power, and anything less than that when it comes to anger can be dangerous,” said Crow.

Last September, weeks before Climategate and the failed Copenhagen conference, MIT professor and atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen published findings which discredited the projections of doom created by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Relying on the now esoteric method known to science as “direct measurement,” Lindzen found that the amount of radiation escaping Earth’s atmosphere increased as global temperature rose.

This finding is opposite the assumption upon which the IPCC models are based. That’s the funny thing about computers. They spit out what you put in.